Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Michael Medved has a great piece at Salvo Magazine about the supposed moral decline in America. He cites current data which show that Americans actually may be behaving more morally than ever before.

The Guttmacher Institute, affiliated with Planned Parenthood, acknowledges that abortion rate rates peaked in 1981, just as our most outspokenly pro-life president, Ronald Reagan, entered the White House. In that year, doctors performed 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. Twenty years later, after tireless efforts by pro-life activists and educators, that number had dropped steadily, year by year, all the way to 21.1, a reduction of nearly 30 percent.

In April 2008 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that between 1990 and 2004, the estimated abortion rate declined by a full 24 percent. In no single year did the rate even inch upward. Among the most vulnerable teenage mothers between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, the abortion rate fell a staggering 55 percent.

One thing that he points out that grabbed my attention is that the national divorce rate is lower now than at any point since 1970. I wonder if the divorce rate in the church is actually higher now than it has ever been? I haven't taken the liberty to look up those numbers, but it strikes me that divorce seems like an absolute epidemic in the church right now.

1 comment:

"I haven't taken the liberty to look up those numbers, but it strikes me that divorce seems like an absolute epidemic in the church right now."

Good luck trying to find anything that resembles good statistical data for divorce rates in the apostolic church...

George Barna did a survey on divorce in churches a few years ago, and pegged the Pentecostal church as having the highest divorce rate at around 44%. He did a more recent survey, but I did not see data specific to Pentecostals. Of course, in this case “Pentecostal” most likely means "other than apostolic Pentecostal." However, the fact that the apostolic church has a divorce rate at all could be considered troubling.

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